Telephone conferences with a large number of members can be subject to disruptive background noise. This is especially true when members of the conference are located in industrial or military settings with high audio volume fans, blowers, or other equipment. It can be difficult to locate the source of the noise due to the large number of members. In addition, processing must be done very efficiently because it has to be replicated for all members of all conferences in a system.
To address the issue of noise, some conventional systems use a “push to talk” handset to only allow audio into a conference when a handset button is pushed. In other systems, a voltage or power threshold is used to enable audio to be added to a conference. Other systems rely on members of the conference to put their telephones into a “mute” mode when not they are talking. Alternatively, a conference operator may determine which member(s) are constantly active and place those members into a mute mode. However, these methods rely on the members of the conference to take action, and may be ineffective or cause unintended interruptions in the conference.
A need exists for an automatic and efficient technique for reducing noise in audio conferences, particularly those conferences involving a large number of members and/or noisy environments.